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“Kind of stupid” (Baraminology)

Baraminology is a largely unexplained and utterly unworkable attempt to drastically redefine animal taxonomy. Its only proponents are Young Earth Creationists, who need it so between two and seven of every creature could fit on a 450-foot boat. The more than 10 million species today needs to be whacked way down. Twenty thousand critters squeezing on the floating menagerie is a generous concession, but we’ll allow that total. But even that number equals just .2 percent of the known species today.

When baraminologists use the word Kind, it refers to one of the pairs of animals aboard Noah’s Ark. They could find nothing in a literal reading of the King James Bible to support this desperate shoehorning attempt, so they resorted to Hebrew. There, they found the words bara and min, which mean created and kind, respectively.

Baraminologists claim these Kinds are responsible for all the animals today. That means they think each species that emerged from the Ark is the ancestor of an average of at least 500 different types of animals. There are some animals that can interbreed, such as tigers and lions or camels and llamas. But the vast majority of animals are incapable of breeding with others. The ones that can hybridize can do so only with a few other animals. We could end the post here since that is a fatal error to barmainology. But let’s have some more fun.

Rather than all animals having common descent, baraminology asserts there were multiple creation events. In other words, each Kind was made separately. So baraminology seeks evidence of discontinuity in the Animal Kingdom. The only points are Negative Evidence, such as DNA differences, unique features of each Kind, or the lack of a specific fossil. However, this Negative Evidence does not prove discontinuity, it only shows that a common ancestor is not immediate. Besides, if their assertion were accurate, the 20,000 Kinds of flood victim animals would be at the same layer of the Geologic Column, with no animals beneath them.

Baraminologists have created trees of descent based on common anatomical features. But they do it without being too Darwinian. An appaloosa and a Clydesdale can descend from the same baramin. But an appaloosa and a giraffe, while vaguely similar, are different enough that giving them mutual ancestry makes creationists nervous. And an appaloosa and a crab, forget it.

Humans automatically get their own category, even though we share 98 percent of our DNA with chimpanzees. The difference is Homo Sapiens’ Chromosome 2, which resulted from the fusion of two ancestral chromosomes that are still separate in other primates. Normally braminoloigsts would put animals this similar in the same baramin, but their arrogance won’t allow it in this case.

Looking at the fossil record, we see that 5 million species would have to derive from 20,000 Kinds within 400 years. If genetic differentiation could occur this fast, we would see a new species emerging within a lifetime. A monkey’s grandson would be similar to a gorilla or some such creature.

Furthermore, the rate required for such rapid genetic change would leave too few viable genomes for negative mutations to be weeded from the gene pool. Baraminology would require the mutation rate be sped up by a quarter million times. If this happened, there would be one million detrimental genetic changes per fertilization. This would be fatal for the Animal Kingdom. Plants, your time may be coming.